Minnesota bill would lessen deer-baiting penalties

Somewhere on the Iron Range, there are a few deer baiters who lost their rifles when they were busted.

They don't think it's fair.

So they called their lawmaker, state Rep. Carly Melin, DFL-Hibbing.

Now there's a bill in the Legislature that would lessen penalties for deer baiting.

Deer baiting is the act of putting out food to attract deer and then shooting the animals when they come to eat. It's not cool, and it's illegal in Minnesota.

Under Melin's plan -- which has the support of at least one influential lawmaker -- law enforcement officials would be prohibited from confiscating the firearms or bows and arrows of deer baiters on a first offense -- if they haven't killed the deer. So if you get busted before you pull the trigger, you keep your gun. If the deer is down, you lose it.

"This isn't at all condoning deer baiting," Melin said Wednesday when she presented the bill to the House Environment and Natural Resources Policy Committee. "But these firearms can be worth thousands of dollars and family heirlooms. ... I don't feel the punishment meets the offense."

There's bipartisan support for the idea, including that of Rep. David Dill, DFL-Crane Lake, who chairs the committee.

"It'll be laid over today, but it's going to pass," Dill informed the committee Wednesday. We'll get back to that in a second.

"If you're a hunter, you'd have to be somebody who rode up here from Florida on a peach train to not know anything about baiting," said Cornish, a former conservation officer for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources who said he seized hundreds of firearms in his day. "If we water it down and take away the ability to take the firearm away, we've probably put it to nothing."

In other words, now isn't the time to be weakening baiting penalties.

The DNR agrees.

Baiting had been on the rise in Minnesota for years when the DNR stepped up enforcement more than five years ago.

The DNR started seizing firearms during busts, something it always had the authority to do. That didn't reduce the number of citations, which has hovered around 150 citations and 50 written warnings annually. Two years ago, lawmakers obliged the agency and added another penalty: loss of big game hunting privileges for a year.

"This year, we had the same numbers, but we're seeing a different type of person," said Lt. Col. Rodman Smith, assistant director of enforcement for the DNR. "Early on, we were dealing with people who probably didn't know it was illegal. The piles of food were really obvious. Now we're dealing with people who are buying camouflaged corn and use camouflaged feeders. They actually take PVC pipes and paint them so they're hard to see. There is very clear premeditation. They have to go out before the season to place the bait -- with the idea and the intent to violate the law."

Smith said the sentiment among deer hunters is clear: Baiting deer violates the principle of fair chase, and hunters aren't accepting it.

"We're getting people from the same hunting party turn in each other," he said.

As for the legislation, "I think this sends a very poor message back to the hunting community that we're going backward on this."

On Friday, Dill backed off his edict that the plan was "going to pass." He told me he meant that he wanted it to pass.

"We've got a little work to do," he said.

Dill, like Melin, has heard from baiters who have lost their firearms, and Friday he said what concerned him is the inconsistency with which conservation officers confiscate, or don't.

According to Smith, of the 150 or so citations a year, about 135 to 140 firearms have been confiscated. Smith said sometimes it's the case that the owner of the firearm didn't know the baiter was going to be baiting, and the law protects the owner in that case. So, loan your Remington to your deer-baiting brother-in-law, and you'll get your piece back.

But Smith didn't have hard numbers. Nor was he sure how many of the citations involved baiters who hadn't -- yet -- killed a deer. So no one knows how many baiters the proposal might actually effect.

The Minnesota Deer Hunters Association, the state's largest group representing the half-million deer hunters, hasn't yet developed an official position.

Here's part of what Cory Bennett, the MDHA's lobbyist, said at the Capitol on Wednesday: "I can't imagine there would be a hunter who would like to lose their weapon a first violation. We certainly do not condone baiting. ... If we were to take an official position, (it) would probably be to support, or to look at some variation."

We'll see.

QUAIL PLAN?

Yes, Minnesota's bobwhite quail. They used to live here. And, the few fortunate quail-loving spotters say they still do, along the far southeastern reaches of the state.

"I've seen quail on my farm, said state Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul, who owns a farm near Harmony, along the Iowa border. A few days ago, Hansen introduced a bill that would require the DNR to "develop a detailed plan to recover the historical native population of quail in Minnesota" by Jan. 15, 2015.

Hansen said the idea isn't to figure out how to start a hunting season but to "start a conversation" on how feasible it might be to recover the bird, perhaps through a combination of habitat restoration and trap-and-transport methods used to re-establish wild turkey populations.

Aside from habitat change, the biggest obstacle facing quail in Minnesota has been the cold winters.

"With climate change, we have an opportunity," Hansen said.

Minnesota has two Quail Forever chapters, which can be found at QuailForever.org.